cked and
stunned by so unexpected a calamity, they could think of nothing better
than turning their backs on the enemy, crowding to the Danube, and
imploring the Romans to let them cross over, and to lodge themselves and
their families in safety from the calamity which menaced them.

Indeed, the very appearance of the enemy scared them; and they shrank
from him, as children before some monstrous object. It is observed of
the Scythians, their ancestors, who, as I have mentioned, came down upon
Asia in the Median times, that they were a frightful set of men. "The
persons of the Scythians," says a living historian,[7] "naturally
unsightly, were rendered hideous by indolent habits, only occasionally
interrupted by violent exertions; and the same cause subjected them to
disgusting diseases, in which they themselves revered the finger of
Heaven." Some of these ancient tribes are said to have been cannibals,
and their horrible outrage in serving up to Cyaxares human flesh for
game, may be taken to confirm the account Their sensuality was
unbridled, so much so that even polygamy was a licence too limited for
their depravity. The Huns were worthy sons of such fathers. The Goths,
the bravest and noblest of barbarians, recoiled in horror from their
physical and mental deformity. Their voices were shrill, their gestures
uncouth, and their shapes scarcely human. They are said by a Gothic
historian to have resembled brutes set up awkwardly on their hind legs,
or to the misshapen figures (something like, I suppose, the grotesque
forms of medieval sculpture), which were placed upon the bridges of
antiquity. Their shoulders were broad, their noses flat, and their eyes
black, small, and deeply buried in their head. They had little hair on
their skulls, and no beard. The report was spread and believed by the
Goths, that they were not mere men, but the detestable progeny of evil
spirits and witches in the wilds of the East.

As the Huns were but reproductions of the ancient Scythians, so are they
reproduced themselves in various Tartar races of modern times.
Tavernier, the French traveller, in the seventeenth century, gives us a
similar description of the Kalmuks, some of whom at present are included
in the Russian Empire. "They are robust men," he says,[8] "but the most
ugly and deformed under heaven; a face so flat and broad, that from one
eye to the other is a space of five or six fingers. Their eyes are very
small, the nose so flat th